Visit Hiroshima in VR

by Beth Divine•14 Nov 2018

Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These two names should make any self
respecting person feel at least a frisson of sorrow for the many innocent
people who were killed – and killed torturously, in some cases – when the USA
dropped a pair of massive atomic bombs on the Japanese cities. They did so in
the full knowledge and understanding that innocent Japanese children, women,
vulnerable and elderly people would be killed – a breach of decency for which
the USA has NEVER been held accountable…

These bombings are traditionally explained away as being
necessary to force the Japanese emperor into ‘behaving’, and it is almost
certain that had the bombings not taken place, the war would have carried on
for much longer, been incredibly bloody, and hey, Japan might have won. The
fact that America has been able to shrug and say ‘Well, we had to win at all
costs,’ and the rest of the word has meekly fallen into line with that rhetoric
just goes to show the unhealthy stranglehold that the USA has on global
narratives… (To those who point to Pearl Harbour as a just cause: Pearl Harbour
was populated by armed forces, these cities were filled with unarmed and
defenceless citizens. Pearl Harbour killed 2403, of which 68 were civilians;
Nagasaki and Hiroshima saw 225 000 people die, most of whom were civilians…)

Virtual reality is stepping in here. A group of Japanese
students, helped by one of their teachers, has recreated Hiroshima before and
after the dropping of the bomb. The five minute experience opens on a nice
sunny day, the early hours of the 6th of August 1945. The sky is
blue, women are strolling, with their children or with beaus, under trees in
full leaf, silhouetted against a powder blue sky. A lone plane drones over this
idyllic scene – there is a twinkle as something is released from the plane’s cargo
bay. A few endless, breathless seconds, and the bomb hits.

After the smoke and debris has cleared, there is nothing but
devastation. Bodies in the immediate blast zone have been obliterated,
literally evaporated to nothing. Buildings, likewise, have been reduced to less
than rubble. A little further away from the impact site, people are still dead,
but there are recognisable bodies. And so on, further and further away, the
less visible damage, but still an endless enormous litany of death and
destruction. One hundred and forty thousand people were killed, not all of them
immediately. Some died from a lack of resources, some from radiation or other
forms of poisoning. Some died from drinking rainwater that had filtered itself
through the noxious cloud of the bomb, dying slowly by inches in the following
months and years.

This visceral experience will perhaps hammer home the true horror
perpetrated by the supposed ‘good guys’ in the name of the ‘greater good’. And
perhaps the USA will finally be brought to account for their vicious and
frankly excessive action. Because, don’t forget; three days after seeing the
horror they’d wrought on Hiroshima, they did it again to Nagasaki…